The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival revealed its lineup this Thursday. In an announcement made early from Italy, the festival confirmed that some of the filmmakers who will be competing for the Golden Lion will be German Werner Herzog –with Bucking fastard, his film starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara and Orlando Bloom–, Italian Nanni Moretti, Japanese Hirokazu Kore-eda, French Florian Zeller, and Anglo-Irish Martin McDonagh.
The latter will present Wild Horse Nine, the film he shot in early 2025 in Rapa Nui and Santiago with an international and Chilean cast. As in In Bruges (2008), the filmmaker narrates the misadventures of two characters in an unfamiliar environment.
This time, the director of The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) focuses his attention on Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), two CIA agents who travel to the island shortly before the 1973 coup d’état, sent from Santiago by their boss, MJ (Steve Buscemi). While they deal with a dark past and present conspiracies, the new bond Chris establishes with two rebellious students (Mariana Di Girolamo and Ailín Salas) threatens to disrupt the course of the trip.
“It was a good place to film because you don’t –necessarily– get distracted by all the things you can do. It’s one of the most remote places on the planet, and that seems like a good place to shoot,” McDonagh told Vanity Fair about a film that will be released in local theaters in November this year.
Son of a Swiss-French Chilean mother and born in Santiago in 1955, Marco Bechis will arrive in Venice with his first feature film in 11 years. It is called Ritorno a Buenos Aires and follows an Italian doctor (Adriano Giannini) who decides to return to the capital to testify in the trial against the former soldiers of the Argentine dictatorship who kidnapped him 33 years ago.
The film has autobiographical undertones: the Chilean-Italian filmmaker himself was a victim of detention and torture by the Argentine dictatorship –in the clandestine center Club Atlético– and testified against his tormentors in the 2010 trial. The director of Garage Olimpo (1999) revisited that episode of his life through literature, through the novel The Solitude of the Subversive.
Aside from Adriano Giannini –an Italian actor who worked with Madonna in Swept Away (2002)–, the film completes its cast with Argentine actors: Ana Celentano, Verónica Gerez, Olivia Nuss, Adrián Fondari, Paula Cohen, Marcelo Chaparro, Marcela Serli, Maria Laila Fernandez.
Some of the other names that will aspire to the Golden Lion will be South Korean Lee Chang-dong, Iranian Ali Asgari, Americans Casey Affleck and Lance Oppenheim, French Stéphane Brizé, and English Danny Boyle. The latter will open the event with Ink, a drama starring Jack O’Connell in the role of newspaper editor Larry Lamb and Guy Pearce as magnate Rupert Murdoch.
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Out of competition, Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás (La flor) will screen Biography of Jorge Luis Borges, a 330-minute documentary that narrates the writer’s biography through objects and places. According to its official synopsis, it does not limit itself to addressing the life of the author of The Aleph, but also focuses on “a century of literature and history.”
Music will also have a relevant place in Venice. The festival will host the debut of Oasis: Don’t look back in anger, a documentary that delves into the successful tour that Liam and Noel Gallagher undertook between July and November 2025, and which brought them to Chile. Created by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) and directed by the duo formed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, it will arrive in national cinemas and Imax theaters this September 10.
If it’s about great characters and mammoth durations, there will also be Joie de vivre, the documentary about Bernardo Bertolucci that Luca Guadagnino has worked on for the past few years. The result is 435 minutes that delve into his cinema, his art, and his life, with interviews with different generations of filmmakers.
As announced two weeks ago, the Chilean film A Fortress will have its world premiere in the Orizzonti International Short Film Competition. Director and screenwriter Alba Gaviraghi presents the story of Antu (Antonia Pereira), a young woman who, after several months locked in her high school occupation, must decide between staying with her classmates or leaving to reunite with her mother, Mariana (Francisca Gavilán).
Meanwhile, actress and director Maggie Gyllenhaal will not only serve as president of the jury but will also exhibit Flesh Impact, a 17-minute film featuring Ellen Burstyn and Dakota Johnson sharing the role of Marilyn Monroe, and which has been described as a tribute to the legendary actress on the centenary of her birth.
The 2026 edition of the Venice Film Festival will be held from September 2 to 12.
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